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I wanted to mute Solarwinds alerts during our patch weekends when all servers are rebooted because they have to be and our mailboxes get flooded with Solarwinds alerts. I decided to use custom properties for this purpose. Here’s what I did.

Login to the Solarwinds web console. Go to the “Settings” page, and then “Manage Custom Properties” under “Node *& Group Management”.

Click “Add Custom Property”, select the default of “Nodes” from the drop down, and create something along the following lines –

Select the nodes you’d like to apply this custom property to. I chose to apply it on all my Windows and VMware nodes. Set the value to be “No”.

Now login to Orion Alerts Manager and pick an alert you’d like to mute during patch weekends. Go to its “Alert Suppression” tab and add a condition on the custom property we created earlier.

And that’s it, really!

Update: Not sure why, but the above didn’t seem to work for me. So I added the Mute_Alerts check as part of the trigger condition itself.

Note: If you don’t get the custom property in Orion, close and restart it as an administrator (i.e. right click and do “Run as Administrator” even if you are already running it with an admin account). Not sure why, but until I did that the custom property didn’t get picked up. You only need to do it one time; after that you can launch Orion normally.

Next time your server estate is being rebooted/ undergoing maintenance, login to Solarwinds webconsole and change the “Mute_Alerts” custom property to “Y” for a node/ nodes that you want to mute alerts for. Below I show how I will mute the alerts for all my Windows nodes.

Go to “Manage Nodes”. Group by “Vendor” and select Windows. Then select all nodes. (The checkbox to select all nodes got blanked out in the screenshot below but it’s easy to find).

Then click on “Custom Property Editor” to get to the screen below.

Here too select all the nodes and click “Edit multiple values”.

From the drop down, change the value for “Mute_Alerts” to “true”. Then save changes and that’s it. :)